Email While Traveling & Working

I am the type of person who likes to travel. Sometimes far far away, sometimes just a hop, skip, and a jump away, and I’m always going all around BC visiting my family at any time of the year. It’s one of the benefits of my type of work – I don’t have to be in any one place to get the work done. As long as I have my laptop, I’m good to go.

Or so I thought.

Not too long ago I took one of my many trips to the Okanagan to visit my family, and this was actually the first time I brought my laptop instead of logging on to my computer from afar. Everything was going great, I even had a readily available wireless connection that I could use, but then all of a sudden my email konks out. Turns out I could send emails just fine still using my usual mail server, but because the wireless connection that I was using was from a different provider than what I used at home, my outgoing smtp server didn’t match and I couldn’t send anything. Now what? Luckily I have an awesome friend who is also a techie like me, and he told me about Google Apps.

Google Apps lets you “borrow” their email servers so that no matter where you are or which internet provider you are using, as long as you have internet access you can use their servers to send & receive your email. Awesome! It took a little time to set it up, but there are loads of instructions out there to help you get through it, and once it’s going it works beautifully. A few weeks later I went to Maui and had absolutely no problems with my email at all. Yay!

And, not only can Google Apps help with your email, you can also use it to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets, you can create new email accounts and new users, and loads of other cool stuff, and best of all it’s FREE! It doesn’t get better than that!

1 Comment

Laurie
on November 22, 2008 at 5:20 am

Hi! I found your blog through the VAnetworking blog roll. What a great post!I use gmail, for both my official email through my webhost and for personal stuff and I love it! People just see a “proper” email address but I have the flexibility of using mobile gmail anywhere I am! And lucky you going to Hawaii – I wish!